Thursday, March 19, 2009

Ephemera 2009 (7)

-- (Sawyer thinks) >> (Jack reacts). Somebody's being very meta over at Lost. Much to my approval.

-- In just two days, the file-syncing software Dropbox has revolutionized my workflow. Dead easy to use, great interface, solid tutorials and guides. I love it.

-- For what it's worth, I cannot believe I just used the word "workflow."

-- Despite my unhealthy love of my Kindle, I recently spent lunch in a used bookstore Chris Downey found near work, and bought a couple vintage 1948 hardcover mysteries. Not much on style, but man those bastards could plot.

-- It turns out there IS a maximum number of pages you can type per day. Ow.

-- I rarely do follow-ups on the mini-posts, but I've mentioned the Lovecraftian police procedural The Translated Man (also available on Kindle) before, and it deserves more than that glancing blow. There was a day reading this that I wanted to be able to read faster, because I wanted it in my brain faster. Blind sonar-using forensic maidens! Teen sidekicks practicing forbidden geometries! A skin disease that turns you invisible! Foppish gentlemen detectives dual-wielding pistols! A frank discussion of the shortcomings of adding a third leg to your shuffling undead behemoth! The heroes fight frikkin' science crimes. I WANT TO GO TO THERE.

-- Setting aside my innate fondness for Wil Wheaton, his series of posts about DM-ing a game of Dungeons & Dragons for his son and his friends pleases me to no end. They are, in the end, about a father sitting down at a kitchen table, for hours, teaching and telling stories with his son.

-- The news that there is now a retractable version of the Uniball Vision pen matters to no one ... except those few of us to whom it matters more than our mother's love.

-- There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

655 comments:

You're never too old for Mama to give you a smackdown! More than your mother's love, indeed.

I do, however, like the sound of The Translated Man. I am very curious about the types of crime that "Only a drug-addicted detective and a young man with a gift for mathematics have the means to solve".

I read Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged when i was in high school and i thought she had a lot to say about artistic integrity that i needed to hear at that point in my life. I do suspect that she would be horrified at the way capitalism has turned. I do think that Objectivism is better used as a tool kit for philosophy than a whole philosophy of itself. But then i think that covers a LOT of philosophies.

Damn you, Rogers. I was making that "wind it up" motion *to myself* for the couple of seconds it took to read your Rand joke. That construct's getting pretty ripe and it was obvious where you were going, except I didn't know what your punchline would be. Amazing that a clam can still make me laugh just by ending on the word "orcs".

I don't want to be a nit-picky jerkwad, but the 30 Rock quote is actually "I want to go to there". The extra "to" gives it that extra funny childish air, which it technically is since Tina Fey got it from her daughter when she first saw a Disney World ad.

I love your Ayn Rand summation, but the fact is that at 14, the books that changed my life were - oddly enough - Asimov's Foundation, Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, and Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. At 16, The Fountainhead struck me as a good book with a morally reprehensible theme.

Translated Man - based off your reviews, I went to Lulu and tried to buy a copy. $8 for the book - fine. $6 for shipping - to quote Hardison, "hell no". I want a hardcopy, a physical object to set on my shelves. I don't want the Kindle/iPhone version, and I don't want to have to print out a copy on my Laserwriter. Amazon only carries the Kindle version, so it looks like I'm SOL.

Regarding, "The heroes fight frikkin' science crimes" and wanting to go there - Either Trail of Cthulhu (ToC) [http://www.pelgranepress.com/trail/index.html] or Mutant City Blues (MCB) [http://www.pelgranepress.com/gumshoe/mutant/index.html] or some combination of the two should get you there. ToC and MCB are pen and paper RPG's that are designed for people wanting to play an investigative rpg game. They are really worth checking out.

I am sooo glad I did not have liquid in my mouth mid-swallow. I would have drowned.

Seen Castle yet? (Shut up, Murder She Wrote peons!) I liked it. Lead reminds me a lot of Paula Marshall. (Yes, I still miss the original Cupid. Shut up!) Patterson & Cannell had real speaking bits in the first episode.

I'm a firm believer that we could stop creeping Galtism in a generation if we made a concerted effort to introduce young people to Aldous Huxley before they have a chance to find Rand. It's not only that they have competing visions, it's simply that Huxley is one of the few authors who can compete with Rand for teenage attention because his writing is approximately the same level of difficulty as hers is, and he does better porn.

-- There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

One of my favorite quotes about Ayn Rand is from a column by comic book writer Steve Grant:

"I've always suspected that Rand, who fled to America as a result of Stalinist persecutions, at least according to her data, was a Soviet sleeper agent sowing discord in America by effectively starting a religion that raised self-satisfaction to the highest of human aspirations (but, as T-Bone Burnett sang, you can't want nothin' if you want satisfaction) and openly mocked and scorned concepts like altruism and charity; her view, enshrined in ATLAS SHRUGGED, that men of great talent should step away from society and await its inevitable collapse under the weight of its own corruption is oddly similar to Marx's conviction that communism was the natural and inevitable end result of capitalist society."

My father never worried about whether he was giving me reading material that was "suitable" for a kid...so by age 11 or 12, besides Tolkien, I was reading Cordwainer Smith, Harlan Ellison, George R.R. Martin (I still have "Sandkings"-related nightmares), Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov...

My father permanently ruined me for bad SF/fantasy. (I also suspect his opinion of Ayn Rand is probably unprintable.)

And I can't go look at the retractable Uniball because then I will need to buy more pens. ::whimper:: Pens!

My appreciation of Wheaton's D&D&Sons accounts is tinged with bitter envy of his kids. A dad that spends time with his kids, doing fun imaginative stuff? *Sigh*

My high school Rand period was very short. What nipped it in the bud was finding and reading Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker. Which was a eye-opening as an acid trip.

Also, perhaps, my interpretation of the last episode of McGoohan's "The Prisoner," which was running on PBS at the time. Number Six, proud egotist, rips the mask off of Number One and finds . . . himself. And escapes physically, only to find that the front door of his London townhouse works just like the one in the Village. Prisoner in his own mind, forever.

Verification word: "beash" I imagine this is an indoors faux-beach catering to the wealthy of a future where real beaches are liberally slathered with dead sealife and coastal waters thick with poisonous jellyfish.

I used to think that despite a singular focus on individual rights and the absolute value of goods and services over all other concepts, Ayn Rand had some good ideas that were worth considering. After years of reflection I have revised this opinion. Actually she was batshit crazy, wrong and a dangerous crank

I think I am a little older and female than some of you. As a teen: RA Heinlein, MZ Bradley and Georgette Heyer. Now? LM Bujold, Judith Merkle Riley, Terry Pratchett, CJ Cherryh, Robert Crais, Lindsey Davis, Jane Haddam, JK Rowling, Firefly, West Wing and...Georgette Heyer. I think I do not want to know what this says about me.

I recall a short story called "Dusty Unicorn" as being a turning point. Basically, it involved a totally alien way of thinking, and taught me that not only do I NOT know everything, but I CAN'T know everything. While I love the classics (Asimov, Heinlein, Doc Smith, Van Vogt, etc.) I don't think anything else (including the inimitable Ms. Rand) had quite the same influence.

It was always the non fiction that blew my mind when I was 14. I read the Vietnam testimonial Dispatches, The Guns of August and All Quiet on the Western Front. Ok the last one is fiction, but barely. Collectively they messed me up a bit. There was also a technical document out of the UN medical committee on the different mortality rates for various sized nuclear explosions over various sized cities. That one was good too.

Needless to say man as hero has never had much of a hold on me. At best we can give good directions to a stranger, after that it gets conflicted.

If I possessed god-like powers, I would give Ayn Rand balls just so I could kick her in them until they turn so blue, that they were black and exploded. *grins* Thanks to her I've had a generation or two of asshats who adore her, as much as they adore Machiavelli, without realizing that both folks were socially retarded asshats of the most epic of orders. Plus, I have often had to punch them in the throat.

Tolkien, on the other hand, I would avoid, else he fail me as nothing more than a puissant amateur.

Apparently I'm unusual in that the books that changed by life were nonfiction. First and foremost was Gödel, Escher, Bach; I read it in my senior year of high school, and it formed my entire philosophical outlook from that point forward. Before then, I was, philosophically speaking; after, I was an adult.

Thanks for the heads-up on Better Off Ted. Always nice to see some Andy Richter Controls the Universe alums on TV again, and their choice of background music is perfect for the tone of the show. Seconding the recommendation on Castle too, even if just to keep Nathan Fillion on TV as long as possible.

You people do realize that Atlas Shrugged was basically the "Everybody Poops" of Ayn Rand's philosophy, right? To truly hate on the women, I think one would have to read her actual direct philosophical writings (instead of a philosophy wrapped up in a rediculous fiction).

Either way, books that changed me most were "Ishmael" (and all the other Daniel Quinn fictions), and I agree with another poster here - non-fiction is what blew my mind as a kid (and still does). On that - 'Guns, Germs, and Steel' by J. Diamond made me rethink everything I was taught about human history.

I do suspect that she would be horrified at the way capitalism has turned.I do think that Objectivism is better used as a tool kit for philosophy than a whole philosophy of itself. But then i think that covers a LOT of philosophies.Assignment ||Coursework ||Dissertation

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I for one enjoyed the generic spam posts in this thread most of all. I only hope they were faked up by real posters and not genuine spam, but then I expect a lot of disappointments in life. Did you know you can buy high quality generic spam quote material online?

How rich to learn recently that the champion of self-starters and rugged individualists applied for and received Social Security, under her married name, ie not her own personal independent autonomous name.

As for whether she would be horrified about modern capitalism, I suspect she would be delighted until she realized that, just as when she helped herself to stolen property (or government assistance, as the rest of us call it), none of her heroes loved her back.

"-- It turns out there IS a maximum number of pages you can type per day. Ow."

I no longer have my copy of David Gerrold's book "The Trouble with Tribbles" {Ballantine} but your line above reminds me of his observation that after changing from a manual typewriter to an IBM Selectric he could type "'X' more pages of s**t a day!"

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Here's a more accurate adaptation, however: "Two writings can change a fourteen-year old’s life: The Communist Manifesto and Alice in Wonderland. One is a childish fantasy that engenders a lifelong obsession with its warped logic, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves the Cheshire Cat."

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You're never too old for Mama to give you a smackdown! More than your mother's love, indeed.

I do, however, like the sound of The Translated Man. I am very curious about the types of crime that "Only a drug-addicted detective and a young man with a gift for mathematics have the means to solve".

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